Netflix has enjoyed great success with the so-called “Disaster Porn” documentary, shining spotlights on cultural flashpoints with “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” in 2019 and the pandemic sensation “The Tiger King” a year later. The genre continued through “Meltdown: Three Mile Island” (2022), “Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99” (2022), “Waco: American Apocalypse” (2023), and two releases this year: “A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054” and “Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster.” Although only the Woodstock entry was officially given the “Trainwreck” banner, all of these docs chronicled events that went horribly, sometimes tragically wrong, and tapped into our insatiable appetites for material that revisits recent historical events through the lens of that most understandable of questions: “WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?”
We now have a fresh batch of catastrophe-scandal docs on Netflix, and this time, they’re all under the “Trainwreck” umbrella, with the last of eight episodes dropping July 29th. From must-watch to passably entertaining to ‘hit the “NEXT” button,’ my rankings:
1. “The Astroworld Tragedy”
A tense, gripping, and harrowing tick-tock accounting of the shocking—and wholly avoidable—tragedy at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival at NRG Park in Houston in November 2021, where 10 young people died from compression asphyxia and hundreds more were injured in a horrifying, catastrophic crowd crush. Concertgoers (some of whom lost loved ones), journalists, and investigators reflect on the circumstances that turned what was supposed to be a beautiful and joyous day of music and celebration into a terrifying nightmare.
The “Day Of…” chronology includes the recollections of fans (“We’re young, we want to live life to the fullest. It was a concert that you didn’t want to miss”), cell phone footage and concise animated graphics, as we see how things went awry from the start, and built to a claustrophobic and petrifying and deadly domino effect, in large part because the crowd swarming Scott’s stage was pushed into a T-shaped barrier system. Says a crowd safety expert, after the fact: “This was not a case of missing red flags. This was a case of ignoring blaring warning sirens. I was shocked…by what I found.” You will be as well. (3.5 stars)
2. “Balloon Boy”
For one crazy day in October of 2009, the nation’s media turned away from coverage of major current events to focus on a homemade, helium-filled flying saucer that was flying fast across the skies of Colorado—a saucer that may or may not have contained a 6-year-old boy who had stowed away on the thing. (Turns out the boy, Falcon Heene, was hiding in the garage attic; swarms of law enforcement personnel somehow failed to find him during repeated searches of the family’s property.) “Balloon Boy” revisits the story with just the right mixture of responsible journalism and WTF incredulity, as the preternaturally eccentric Richard Heene, his wife Mayumi and their children continue in present day to maintain it wasn’t a hoax. “My family and I made an experimental flying saucer…and it took off,” says Heene.
Still, there’s that damning footage of the family appearing on “Larry King Live,” with substitute host Wolf Blitzer asking little Falcon, “Why didn’t you come out?”, and the boy looking at his family and saying, “You guys said, we did this for the show.” On the Balloon-o-Meter scale of 1 to 100, I’m about a 75 in favor of calling bull**** on the Heenes’ story. All these years later, Heene and family are still working on science-y things, with Heene telling us, “I’m working on something new…and it’s going to be really big.”
OK sport. (3.5 stars)
3. “Poop Cruise”
A few years after the Balloon Boy madness, in February of 2013, we were consumed by another wild story unfolding in real time, as more than 4,000 people were stuck on a Carnival cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico after a fire in the engine room. As one interviewee in “Poop Cruise” notes, a ship like this is basically a floating skyscraper on its side—and in this case, the floating skyscraper was without power and turning into a noxious waste dump. (“There’s only so much a toilet can take,” says the cruise director. Truer words were never spoken.) “Poop Cruise” is like “Titanic” without the death.
We’re reminded there are two worlds on a cruise ship—the hardworking crew members and the passengers who have come to party and be pampered—but after the mishap, they were all in it together, as all hell broke loose, with food supplies running out, human waste flooding the passageways and someone making the terrible decision to open the bar and dispense free booze, which led to fights as well as reports of carnal activity in the open. “Poop Cruise” makes good use of cell phone footage and news archival coverage, as former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin notes, “America couldn’t get enough” of the story. A chef on the ship recalls, “People were covering the poop with the toilet paper, and then again pooping on top of it, so it was a layer after layer after layer. It was like a lasagna.”
Not exactly “It’s been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint,” but it has a certain graphic resonance to it. (3 stars)
4. “Storm Area 51”
The only two-parter in the series features a number of colorful and real-life characters, most notably one Matt Roberts, who in 2019 was working at a vape kiosk in the Valley Plaza Mall in Bakersfield, CA., and would go home every night to his desktop and write entries as “The Shitposter,” which he describes as “a digital diary of stupid shit.” How can you not love this guy? After watching a YouTube clip of Joe Rogan talking to someone who once worked at the highly classified United States Air Force facility known as Area 51 in the Nevada desert, which has been Ground Zero for conspiracy theories since the 1950s, Roberts was inspired to ask, “What if every fool on the Internet converged on Area 51? What would they do, shoot everyone?”
Thus was born one of the stupidest and most fascinating online social movements of all time. “Storm Area 51” recounts how Roberts quickly lost control of the narrative, as literally millions of people from around the world signed up to well, storm Area 51, much to the alarm of the locals. We’re introduced to the likes of “Disco Donnie,” a promoter tasked with turning the event into a kind of Woodstock for alien enthusiasts, and Col. Cavan Craddock, who commanded the 99th Air Base Wing and had no choice but to take the event seriously. It was the correct decision, but he comes across a little like Sgt. Hulka in “Stripes” when he says, “There’s nothing funny about two million people wanting to Storm Area 51.”
Spoiler alert: On the night of the big event, it was more like a couple hundred random clowns than a couple million who arrived at the gates of Area 51, and there was no storming of anything. As for our guy Matt Roberts, a week later, he was back at the vape shop, looking and sounding for all the world like a character in a Kevin Smith movie. (3 stars)
5. “The Cult of American Apparel”
You might recall those racy ads for American Apparel in the mid-to-late 2000s, featuring half-naked models (some of them employees or friends of the company) in provocative poses. CEO Dov Charney openly courted controversy while boasting to the media about “T-shirts that are made in a non-exploitative setting.” But as “The Cult of American Apparel” reports in straightforward, boilerplate fashion, Charney was a mercurial and allegedly abusive figure. He called employees in the middle of the night to scream “I hate you! I f****** hate you!”, would hold weekly conference calls with store managers to name a “Fool of the Week,” and, most damning, allegedly sexually harassed a number of female employees who had signed agreements saying they couldn’t say anything disparaging about the company.
Charney’s notoriety was such that he was lampooned on “Saturday Night Live” by Fred Armisen, and there’s no denying the seriousness of the allegations (though Charney was never charged with any crimes), but the guy is a garden-variety asshole. This is a serviceable piece of work about a terrible man, and that’s about it. (2.5 stars)
6. “The Real Project X”
As was the case with “Storm Area 51,” this is a case of a relatively innocuous posting that goes viral. But whereas only a small group of idiots actually showed at Area 51, thousands of party-hungry morons descended upon a family home in the small town of Haren, Netherlands, after a girl named Merthe inadvertently clicked “Public Event” for her 16th birthday party in 2012. We meet a dude named Laurens who recalls thinking, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I invited more people?” and then sent out hundreds of invites, leading to a rowdy mob showing up and wreaking havoc that night, as they tried to duplicate the madness depicted in the fictional, found-footage teen comedy “Project X” (which was said to be loosely inspired by an actual out-of-control teen party in Australia). The most interesting “character” in “The Real Project X” is a man named Chris, who at the time was the “night mayor” charged with overseeing all things that happened after dark in the region. Cool job, until it wasn’t.
“The Real Project X” is a study in alcohol-fueled mob mentality, with some of the drunken prats looting local stores and businesses, resulting in more than 100 arrests. As for poor Merthe, who was totally faultless, she still seems affected by the event, though she’s forgiving of those who turned it into a near-riot.
Maybe she should head to Cali and bond with our “Storm Area 51” buddy Matt. (2.5 stars)
7. “Mayor of Mayhem”
It’s not that the tragic-comic story of the late Rob Ford’s Jacobean descent into scandal and chaos isn’t worthy of a documentary, or, for that matter, a feature film, though I’m not sure how many remember “Run This Town” from 2019, with Damian Lewis (!) portraying the disgraced mayor of Toronto. It’s just that “Mayor of Mayhem,” while competently filmed and featuring the usual amalgam of news footage and interviews with journalists and former colleagues, et al., doesn’t really tell us anything new about Ford’s rise to power as a blunt-talking, deal-making populist—and his spectacular fall from grace, as he was caught on video smoking crack cocaine. Twice.
Perhaps Ford’s saga will get the limited dramatic series treatment one day; one can imagine Jesse Plemons disappearing into the role. (2 stars)
8. “P.I. Moms”
A superficial and at times confusing take on a story that is admittedly crazy but isn’t particularly splashy or high-stakes in the first place: the saga of a never-seen reality series called “P.I. Moms,” and the downfall of the founder of the detective agency that was to be the centerpiece of the show. In 2010, Lifetime began production on “P.I. Moms of San Francisco,” which followed a team of soccer moms as they investigated what appeared to be mundane cases of alleged infidelity, insurance fraud, and custody disputes. Not exactly the stuff of “Charlie’s Angels,” eh? Turns out much of it was staged (shocker!), and the agency’s founder, a former cop named Chris Butler, was involved in criminal activities that landed him an 8-year federal prison sentence. The series was canceled before airing. It wouldn’t have been much of a loss if the same thing had happened to this documentary. (2 stars)
A mixed bag, to be sure—but I’m still hoping for another batch of “Trainwreck” documentaries in the near future. How about “Trainwreck: The Coldplay Kiss-Cam Debacle,” “Trainwreck: The Blue Origin Backlash,” “Trainwreck: Blake v Baldoni”…
